textstat

A cinematic, Apple-inspired story of your texting history — top contacts, busiest hours, longest streaks, most-used words and emoji, and a year-at-a-glance calendar heatmap.

Everything runs in your browser. Your messages are parsed on your own machine by a Web Worker. Nothing is uploaded, there is no backend, and no request carries your data anywhere. You can check: open DevTools → Network, and watch it stay empty while your wrap generates.

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Using it

iPhone

The app assumes you are importing from an iPhone and starts by asking which situation applies to you:

• Messages in iCloud is enabled on a Mac: use the chat.db already synced to the Mac. This skips backup creation entirely. An Address Book database or .vcf can be added for contact names and photos.
• A local backup already exists: choose the existing Finder, Apple Devices, or iTunes backup folder.
• A backup still needs to be made: follow the OS-specific visual walkthrough in the app, then select the resulting folder.

For the direct Mac route, the files normally live at:

File	Location
Messages	~/Library/Messages/chat.db
Contacts	~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources

For local backups:

	macOS	Windows
Back up with	Finder	Apple Devices (free, Microsoft Store)
Backups live in	~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup	%USERPROFILE%\Apple\MobileSync\Backup
		or %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup on older iTunes

Leave backup encryption however it is. Encrypted backups are supported and prompt for the local backup password. That password never leaves the page; Web Crypto uses it to unwrap the backup keybag locally.

Two notes worth knowing:

• Windows genuinely needs the Apple Devices app. Without it, Windows sees an iPhone as a camera and can only read DCIM — the backup capability and the "Trust This Computer" handshake both come from the driver it installs.
• If your backup is huge, turning on iCloud Photos usually shrinks it a lot; photos already in iCloud are excluded from local backups.

Android

Export your history with SMS Backup & Restore, then drop the .xml on the page. Optionally add a .vcf contacts export for names and photos. Use the small Using Android? link under the landing-page intro to switch import modes. No computer is required.

Viewing and sharing

The generated story uses fluid glass controls, keyboard navigation, and replayable slide animations. Every statistics page—including the final summary—has a Share action. Supported browsers open the native share sheet; other browsers copy a page-specific summary and link to the clipboard.

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Development

npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:3000
npm run build        # TypeScript + production build
npm run lint

Open http://localhost:3000/mock to review the complete 19-slide experience with synthetic data. It bypasses importing and activates every conditional slide; no backup is needed.

Next.js 16 (App Router) · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 · shadcn/ui · Framer Motion. SQLite is read via sql.js compiled to WebAssembly, vendored under public/vendor/. There are no runtime dependencies beyond the bundle.

worker.js lives in two places. The root copy is the source; public/worker.js is what the app actually loads. After editing, run cp worker.js public/worker.js.

Tests

npm test             # encrypted-backup round trip (fast, no browser)
npm run test:e2e     # builds, then drives real Chromium through the iPhone flow

Neither needs a real iPhone backup — test_backup_fixture.cjs synthesises one, including a valid keybag, wrapped class keys and AES-CBC payloads. The binary plists are written by Python's plistlib and the keys wrapped by Node's OpenSSL bindings, so the parsers under test are never validated against their own writers.

The end-to-end test stubs navigator.userAgentData to assert both the Windows and macOS guide variants, then runs a full encrypted import through to the slideshow. It needs npx playwright install chromium once.

Architecture

See AGENTS.md for the full map — file layout, the backup decryption pipeline, the stats aggregation, and the conventions for adding slides.

The short version:

src/app/page.tsx            screen routing + worker orchestration
src/app/mock/page.tsx       direct-entry mock slideshow for visual review
src/components/landing/     iPhone-first decision flow, OS guides, backup picker
src/components/story/       slideshow + 19 slide components
src/lib/backup.ts           backup discovery (3 browser intake routes)
src/lib/mock-stats.ts       comprehensive synthetic slideshow fixture
src/lib/os.ts               OS detection, per-OS backup paths
public/worker.js            all parsing: XML, SQLite, backup decryption, stats

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Privacy

No analytics on your message content, no uploads, no server-side processing. The only network requests the app makes are for its own static assets, plus Apple emoji images from a CDN when rendering an iMessage story. Deployment uses Vercel Analytics for page views only.